Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular 2006 healing-heartbreak-through-travel memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” earned backlash from those who saw it as a high-profile example of privileged Western women buying their way to peace and enlightenment. (“Eat, Pray, Spend” was how one feminist publication characterized it.) But what does it mean when a woman who was born in India and raised in the United States since infancy takes her own journey “home” in the wake of a heartbreak or two, with Gilbert’s book tucked away in her luggage? In Minita Gandhi’s wry, wise and sometimes terrifying solo show, “Muthaland,” it means embracing the complexity of both worlds, without fully understanding where one fits in either.

Directed by Lookingglass artistic director Heidi Stillman on the spare intimate stage of Berwyn’s 16th Street Theater, Gandhi’s piece moves back and forth in time. The key event, which serves as a narrative fulcrum of sorts, is the arranged wedding of Gandhi’s younger brother back in India. (As a harbinger of the complexities of extended family relationships, her brother is actually a cousin who was raised by her parents in the more-promising atmosphere of the United States.)

Through this trip, Gandhi explores her own past, as well as that of her parents. We see Gandhi in her college years, persuading her parents to let her attend an acting conservatory, despite her mother’s protestations that an Indian woman will never be allowed to tackle major Shakespearean roles. (She’s done all right for herself, obviously — you may know Gandhi from her recurring role as Dr. Prospere on “Chicago Fire.”)

We see her through relationships, from the on-again, off-again boyfriend she blocks on social media while also signing up for Tinder, to the one who got away — a seemingly perfect Indian man to whom she just couldn’t commit. And finally, through a painful crisis not of her making, we see her learn more about her country of birth and the parents who created a place for her to make her own kind of music and magic, wherever her travels take her.

It’s in some ways a familiar story, but what sets “Muthaland” apart from similar journey-to-the-center-of-my-heritage tales is Gandhi’s willingness to let some questions hang in the air. There is resolution of sorts, but it comes from Gandhi’s own newfound resolve to embrace the complexities of her identity and her mixed (if not outright hostile — and for good reason) feelings about the land of her birth. (Among those complexities is that her family practices Jainism, making them a minority among their own extended Hindu family in Mumbai.)

Along the way, there are sly homages to Bollywood rom-com conventions, complete with the sort of dance interludes made famous by the genre. (Gandhi and Anu Bhatt collaborated on the choreography.) Gandhi moves smoothly from playing herself at various stages of her life to her supportive (if occasionally befuddled) parents, to her saucy siblings, to various people she meets during a meditation retreat in India that takes a dangerous turn.

With only a pair of suitcases, a work light and a single chair, Gandhi evokes the color and confusion of India and the small, quiet secrets of her parents’ own journeys from the traditions of their homeland to the sometimes-confounding cultural norms of their new country. There are a few points that feel a tad belabored, but on the whole, Gandhi’s “Muthaland” creates a funny, brash and truthful portrait of embracing one’s past without being smothered by it.